Voting Together

Intergenerational Politics and Civic Engagement among Hmong Americans

Carolyn Wong

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780804782234
• eBook ISBN: 9781503600430
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Social Sciences

Hmong American immigrants first came to the United States as refugees of the Vietnam War. Forty years on, they have made a notable impact in American political life. They have voter participation rates higher than most other Asian American ethnic groups, and they have won seats in local and state legislative bodies. Yet the average level of education among Hmong Americans still lags behind that of the general U.S. population and high rates of poverty persist in their community, highlighting a curious disparity across the typical benchmarks of immigrant incorporation.

Carolyn Wong analyzes how the Hmong came to pursue politics as a key path to advancement and inclusion in the United States. Drawing on interviews with community leaders, refugees, and the second-generation children of immigrants, Wong shows that intergenerational mechanisms of social voting underlie the political participation of Hmong Americans. Younger Hmong Americans engage older community residents in grassroots elections and conversation about public affairs. And in turn, within families and communities, elders often transmit stories that draw connections between ancient Hmong aspirations for freedom and contemporary American egalitarian projects.

ONE

Citizenship and Participation

At the end of the Vietnam War, tens of thousands of Hmong adults and children fled from their homes in Laos to seek temporary refuge and protection in Thailand. One of many ethnic minority groups in Laos, the Hmong had been divided on both sides of a civil war fought between the reigning Royal Lao Government and the Pathet Lao communist insurgency. Those Hmong who had sided with the Royal Lao Government against the communists had a legitimate fear of retribution when the Pathet Lao declared military victory and prepared to establish the Lao People’s Democratic Republic in December 1975.

The civil war in Laos was part of a series of wars that took place in Southeast Asia after the end of the Second World War. Beginning in 1946, the First Indochina War was fought principally in Vietnam by independence forces against French colonial rule; later, the war in Vietnam extended into the French protectorates of Laos and Cambodia. This regional conflict ended with the signing of the 1954 Geneva Accords, which included an agreement by France to withdraw its troops from Vietnam, as well as separate cease-fire agreements in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

It was not long before fighting broke out again in Vietnam, which had been temporarily divided under the 1954 Geneva Accords between a northern zone under the administration of the Viet Minh, an independence coalition led by the Communist Party, and a southern zone governed by the rival Republic of Vietnam. Again, the conflict in Vietnam grew to encompass interconnected civil wars in Cambodia and in Laos. Known popularly in the United States as the “Vietnam War,” the Second Indochina War began in the late 1950s and came to an end in 1975.¹ Its intensity and regional scope were fueled by direct military intervention and various types of military assistance given by the United States and the Soviet Union to their allies.

One hidden part of the Vietnam War is known as the Secret War in Laos. The United States, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam were technically obligated under an international agreement not to militarily intervene in the internal affairs of Laos because of that country’s neutrality. Instead of sending troops to assist the Royal Government of Laos in opposing the communists, the United States provided massive military assistance to the royalist government. Castle writes that the United States ran a “multi-billion dollar U.S. aid program,” staged largely from Thailand and headed by the US ambassador to Laos, which “came to include a complex military logistics network, a civilian-operated airborne resupply and troop movement system, a multinational ground and air force, and the introduction into Laos of a limited number of U.S. military personnel.”²

The geography of Southeast Asia made Laos strategically important in the war. The small country is sandwiched between Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, and Myanmar (formerly Burma). With shared borders with each of these countries, Laos stood at a geographic crossroads strategically vital to the war. Military supply lines from North to South Vietnam along the Ho Chi Minh trail ran through Laos.

The status of Laos as a neutral state complicated matters for the foreign powers seeking control in the region. Laos had declared independence from France in 1953. At the 1954 Geneva Conference, representatives of the nine participating states agreed on “undertaking to respect the sovereignty, the independence, the unity and territorial integrity of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.”³ Subsequently, under the agreements of the 1962 Geneva Accord, the United States, the Soviet Union, Vietnam, and eleven other states agreed with Laos to respect its neutrality under the International Agreement on the Neutrality of Laos, and the 1962 Protocol to the Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos prohibited the introduction of foreign regular or irregular troops, foreign paramilitary formations, and foreign military personnel into Laos. In addition, the protocol included a prohibition against the introduction of armaments, munitions, and war material generally, except for conventional armaments in quantities the Royal Government of Laos considered necessary for its national defense.

The 1962 Geneva agreements did not prohibit the release of ordnance by US forces into the territory of Laos. It is estimated that the US forces dropped two billion tons of ordnance in Laos, with the principal aim of cutting off North Vietnamese supply lines that ran through a part of Laos.⁴ From 1964 to 1973, the American military ran B-52 bombing operations about every eight minutes, twenty-four hours a day.

The Hmong played a critical role in missions to rescue downed American pilots. They also guarded the radars guiding the combat aircraft. On the rescue missions, thousands of Hmong lost their lives. On the ground, the guerrilla units under Vang Pao’s command were sometimes called “the Hmong Army,” but his units included soldiers of other ethnicities. Vang Pao’s units carried the main burden of the offensive ground operations in northeastern Laos after 1968, according to Castle. The Royal Lao Army was divided into five regions. Four of the five regions had Special Guerrilla Units (SGUs) funded by US military assistance to Laos. Major General Vang Pao was the commander of Military Region II. In the conflict, it is believed that, all told, there were more than thirty-five thousand Hmong war casualties and many more who incurred disabling injuries.⁵

As the American public became aware of covert US involvement in Laos, opposition to it grew. More widely, the tide of public opinion in the United States turned against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. The United States began reducing its troops in South Vietnam. By 1972, it was clear that the United States would withdraw. In April 1975, the communist forces in Vietnam and Cambodia prevailed. In Laos by that time, Vang Pao’s army had collapsed, and the Pathet Lao had taken increased control of a provisional coalition government. As the communist forces were mounting final attacks on military positions of the Royal Lao Army, Vang Pao requested and received air support from the United States for the departure of Hmong and Lao Theung (each a distinct ethnic minority group) military officers, civil servants, and their families from the air base in Long Tieng to Thailand. In May 1975, the CIA flew Vang Pao, his family, and some senior military officers to Thailand.⁶

The Hmong who did not receive this help from the United States left for Thailand in a mass exodus on foot. Families took flight with their small children under the cover of night with the hope of avoiding enemy fire. For those who reached the Laos side of the Mekong River, it was very hard to find a small boat to ferry them across the treacherous waters to Thailand. Typically, all that was available to assist them in crossing was a primitive flotation device. Eventually about fifty thousand Hmong adults and children survived and would find shelter in the Thai camps. Most resettled in the United States, beginning with a first wave in 1975. Other countries of resettlement included Australia, Argentina, Canada, France, French Guiana, and Germany.⁷ Between 1980 and 1996, about 130,000 Hmong refugees resettled in the United States.⁸ The number of persons of Hmong origin living in the United States grew by about 97 percent from 1990 to 2000, and by 40 percent in the next decade, reaching a count of 260,073 persons, according to the US Census.⁹

The Hmong who reached the Thai camps would be officially classified as refugees according to United Nations conventions.¹⁰ But as Minnesota state senator Mee Moua remarked in an interview with the New York Times in 2002: “We’ve always been viewed as refugees. As a people, we’ve never really had a country.”¹¹ Moua had just been elected to the Minnesota State Senate, representing a district in St. Paul. The value of citizenship to people long regarded and treated as social outsiders, or “the other,” lies in its equalizing of status on moral grounds, as Mee Moua describes:

There is this belief, there is this desire to believe without judgment that citizenship is the equalizer. . . . We know that that’s not the reality of the political, social, and economic world that we live in. People get treated differently because of skin color politics or ethnic and gender politics . . . but at the end of the day, the moral position that we come to is that it is because we fundamentally believe that our citizenship makes us all equal that then we are so offended when we are treated differently. . . . The difference here is that fundamentally, we have rights. . . . [T]he best symbolism of that is that when you go to vote, you get one vote, and it’s secret ballot and it all weighs the same.¹²

The dream of the Hmong “to have their own country” is a familiar theme in the oral literature preserved and recounted by Hmong Americans in the United States. Lee discusses how being “without a country” has meant different things in the past. One meaning refers to how the Hmong have been treated as social outsiders in the country where they live, whether or not they have formal citizenship status. Lee examines a second meaning represented by the aspiration of the Hmong for political autonomy, which may represent a desire to have their own sovereign country. This was the aim of Hmong messianic movements, which Lee shows had articulated the desire for a Hmong kingdom, influenced by ancient Confucian thinking about the “kingdom” as a mandate from heaven. The messianic leader in Laos represented a type of Hmong leader different from those prominent Hmong who held government positions under French colonial rule or in the independent constitutional monarchy of twentieth-century Laos.¹³

A third way in which the phrase “without a country” is sometimes used is in the discourse about the Hmong people’s own ethnic history to describe a status they have held in the international system as refugees. When the Hmong who left Laos were compelled to seek and receive protection as refugees after the Vietnam War, their status fit the criteria for refugee status as defined by the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees; that is, they were considered refugees owing to the “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, [being] outside the country of his nationality and . . . unable or, owing to such fear, . . . unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.”¹⁴

The Hmong who left Laos because of threats of reprisal—as the new regime regarded them as traitors or as collaborators with enemy forces—would not be formally classified as “stateless” or “without a country” under conventions of international law. Modern-day conventions classify a person as stateless if no country recognizes the individual’s citizenship status. The Hmong who fled Laos as refugees were still Laotian citizens, according to the national government of Laos, although UN authorities recognized that they had a legitimate fear of political persecution in their homeland. For the Hmong who longed for a homeland where they would be accepted and protected as citizens under the law, the fear of persecution fueled the feeling of being cast into the international system “without a country.” The refugee experience also forcefully underscored the value of citizenship to the Hmong as a matter of survival and human dignity.

The work of Somers on citizenship helps clarify the significance and moral force of the Hmong Americans’ demand for citizenship rights in the United States. Somers builds on an argument advanced by Arendt that social inclusion and political membership are prerequisites for a person to have “any rights at all,” including the right to human life.¹⁵ Arendt pointed out how easily Western nations could remain silent when the Jews were exterminated during the Holocaust because their expulsion from German citizenship severed attachments to a political body. As stateless persons, without the “right to have rights,” they become “unrecognizable as fellow humans.”¹⁶

Hmong Americans have actively sought citizenship status because it affords equality of standing on moral grounds, as Moua suggests. When Hmong Americans are able to claim US citizenship rights, this increases the expectation of equal treatment. In turn, being a citizen helps motivate self-initiated action to claim rights or demand equal protection under the law when people are confronted with injustices rooted in systematic social and economic inequality. By 2013, not quite forty years after the end of the Vietnam War, about 88 percent of the Hmong American population held US citizenship status.

Identity and Participation

One source of motivation to take part in politics is found in expressions of ethnic identity stories, which interpret a Hmong migratory history in Asia. A recurring set of themes focuses on the resistance to persecution, the defense of cultural ways of life, and a quest to be treated with dignity. The story line of a Hmong identity originates in ancient China. It is sustained to the present day with memories of an ethnic history extending through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and in places scattered across China and Southeast Asia.

One of the difficulties anthropologists and historians have long encountered when carrying out research on the Hmong of China and Southeast Asia stems from complexity in ethnic terminology. Much like the term Asian American is a conglomerate category, which includes many ethnic subgroups, the term Miao has long been used to refer to many ethnic groups different from the Han, who ethnically comprise the majority of people in China. The term is used presently in China to refer to “a set of ethnic groups, all belonging to the same linguistic subfamily (the Miao-Yao), from which the Hmong of Southeast Asia are descended and to which they are intimately related.”¹⁷ These ethnic groups include at least four subgroups—the Hmong, Hmu, Kho Xiong, and Hmao. In historical studies of the Hmong in China, scholars have noted that ancient texts refer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Series Page
• Contents
• List of Tables, Figures, and Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1. Citizenship and Participation
• 2. Reconstructing Identity Narratives
• 3. Participation in Local Contexts
• 4. Views on Politics: From Leadership and the Grassroots
• 5. Human Rights Advocacy Across Borders
• 6. Deepening Intergenerational Participation
• Appendixes
• Notes
• Index